Podcast
Dynamics Update
Hosted by dynamicsupdate · EN
Dynamics Update is a podcast with the main focus of summarizing Microsoft's monthly releases for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and the One Version strategy. We blend that with some special episodes containing interviews and event coverage.
Guiding you through the content is Gustav Sundblad and Johan Persson, Senior Specialists at Engage Group
21episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Interview - Max Hentschel - Application Insights
Apr 3000:32:57Tap to summarizeIn this episode, we welcome back Max Henchel, Technical Consultant at Microsoft, to dive deep into the topic of telemetry. We previously discussed Dual-write, but realized we needed to go back to basics to explain the telemetry infrastructure and how to actually start measuring performance in a smart way. Max is one of the primary drivers behind the ISM Telemetry Model, a framework that simplifies working with Application Insights for Dynamics users. In this episode, we discuss: Why isn't out-of-the-box telemetry enough? How the ISM model acts as a "wrapper" to make it easier for partners and customers to get started without drowning in data. The importance of custom emission points: Why you can't just "flip a switch," but actually need to design your telemetry to understand critical business processes like order flows and batch jobs. Cost vs. Benefit: Strategies for data storage and how to keep costs down in Azure by focusing on short-term analysis (e.g., 30-day retention). From "It's slow" to hard facts: How to use telemetry to address subjective experiences of performance with actual data and system "heartbeats". Exception logging: How to find the notorious "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error using call stacks directly in App Insights, without needing to copy production databases for debugging. Cross-Enterprise Monitoring: Using a single Application Insights repository to track an end-to-end chain across different applications like AIS or Power Platform. Three tips to get started: Set it up now: It takes less than an hour to get basic telemetry in place. Use FastTrack reports: Leverage ready-made dashboards to get immediate visualization. Learn Kusto (KQL): Max recommends the Kusto Detective Agency for a fun, interactive way to learn how to query your data.
Transcribe →Archiving and Long-Term Retention
Mar 1300:31:05Tap to summarizeIn this episode, hosts Johan Persson and Gustav Sundblad welcome Microsoft product experts Shivam Pandey and Roger Sa to discuss the critical strategies for managing high-volume data in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. As data storage costs and performance stability become top priorities for enterprises, the team explores the latest innovations in archiving and long-term retention.
Transcribe →10.0.47
Feb 1300:26:27Tap to summarizeDynamics Update: 10.0.47 Release Notes In this episode, hosts Johan Persson and Gustaf Sundblad dive into the latest features and performance enhancements arriving in late March with version 10.0.47. The discussion centers heavily on data management, environment efficiency, and new AI-driven tools. Key Highlights: Subscription Billing & Commerce: New performance enhancements for unbilled revenue batches and features to purge or archive high-volume commerce transactions. Inventory & Warehouse Management: Introduction of inventory transaction consolidation—a prerequisite for long-term archiving—and new load record archiving to reduce Dataverse consumption costs. Power Platform Integration: The hosts advocate for moving sandbox environments to the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) to unlock better performance and "no transaction data" copying features. AI & Copilot Agents: Updates to the Account Reconciliation Agent and workspace, including improved legal entity filtering in sandbox environments. Pricing Management: Enhanced import/export entities for complex trade agreements and a "coming soon" generic base currency feature to simplify global pricing rules. Developer Tools: Significant updates to the MCP Server, including OData access for entities, and improvements to Visual Studio 2022 "Find References" filtering.
Transcribe →Batch Telemetry Agent
Jan 2300:33:56Tap to summarizeEpisode recorded across three time zones - Singapore, US, and Sweden Johan and Gustav welcome Prashant Verma (Microsoft Singapore ISD) and Hemanth Kumar (Microsoft Azure FastTrack) for a technical deep dive into the batch telemetry agent. Prashant's origin story reveals that the agent emerged from his Premier Field Engineer days, handling APAC escalations for slow-running batch jobs and throttling issues, and recognizing that customers needed self-service access to insights previously requiring support tickets. The conversation positions the agent as a "team member" that democratizes root cause analysis, bridging the gap between technical Application Insights data and business users who lack Kusto query skills. Hemant emphasizes the transformation: rather than context-switching between Teams conversations and Application Insights dashboards, system admins can troubleshoot directly within Teams, where business users are already reporting issues. Johan's thesis emerges: fewer people logging into Finance & Operations is actually better since it's not intuitive for non-daily users. The agent supports this by making troubleshooting accessible to IT staff unfamiliar with F&O's interface. Gustav tests the waters on autonomous monitoring - could agents proactively ping Teams when detecting anomalies? The answer: marry Application Insights anomaly detection with agentic analysis to create alerts that inform users of slow critical jobs and suggest remediation. The MCP server integration (version 46 required) enables self-healing actions, such as restarting batch jobs, though both hosts and guests emphasize guardrails. Gustav suggests SharePoint lists indicating which jobs are safe to auto-restart; testing reveals Claude 4.5 best follows these instructions without hallucination compared to GPT models. A revealing war story: a customer configured batch jobs requesting 300 threads when their environment only supported 160 total threads, strangling the entire system for a week until Prashant identified it through telemetry. The agent now surfaces these misconfigurations instantly. Setup requires just five minutes with existing Application Insights (ISM telemetry no longer needed), plus 15 minutes for agent installation. Model selection matters: 4.1 suffices for simple queries, 5.0 for complex analysis, and Sonnet for query generation.
Transcribe →Soverign Cloud
Dec 1900:29:50Tap to summarizeEpisode recorded during hectic times with new puppies and packed schedules Johan and Gustav tackle Microsoft's announcement about comprehensive sovereign solutions for European organizations - a complex topic they admit requires legal expertise they don't possess, but impacts every European Dynamics implementation. Opening with their standard recommendation of West Europe as primary datacenter and North Europe (UK) as fallback, they debunk latency concerns from 10-12 global implementations spanning Europe, US, and Asia with single instances. The conversation traces the Max Schrems saga - his persistent legal challenges to US-owned datacenters storing European data, questioning whether peace-time laws hold meaning when conflicts arise. Gustav shares a revealing anecdote about a Swedish governmental organization demanding local datacenter hosting while unknowingly using Office 365 stored elsewhere, illustrating how organizations often lack understanding of where their data actually resides. Microsoft's three-tier sovereign cloud offering emerges: Sovereign Public Cloud (current setup enhanced with Data Guardian ensuring European-only personnel access and customer-managed encryption keys for everything), Sovereign Private Cloud (Azure in your basement, managed like public cloud, supporting email and SharePoint initially with broader rollout planned), and National Partner Cloud (locally-owned datacenters managed by European partners like T-Mobile or CGI, reminiscent of Germany's now-closed datacenter). The Dynamics implications remain murky. While Microsoft 365 and Azure workloads seem straightforward for partner clouds, Johan expresses skepticism about Dynamics timelines given its complexity and surrounding infrastructure requirements. The hosts note CRM already works in Norway and Sweden, but Finance & Operations and Customer Insights remain unavailable, and not all datacenters receive updates simultaneously - West/North Europe lead in frequency and features. A new wildcard enters: potential tariffs on American-owned datacenters could dramatically impact cloud economics overnight, undermining the predictable subscription model that justified cloud migration. The Blog Post: Announcing comprehensive sovereign solutions empowering European organizations - The Official Microsoft Blog
Transcribe →Interview - Anne Krupke
Nov 2100:30:27Tap to summarizeJohan returns from sunny Orlando to Sweden's +1°C rain to interview Anne Krupke, Microsoft's Senior Product Marketing Manager who brings a unique perspective - starting as an implementation consultant for supply chain and manufacturing, then FastTrack solution architect, now marketing. Her journey embodies the shift Microsoft is making: selling products the way they're actually implemented. Anne reveals the genesis of Microsoft's business process-centric approach. For years, partners were process-oriented while Microsoft marketed individual apps and features, creating a jarring disconnect when customers reached implementation. The solution? Sell products using process-centric language that customers actually understand, then show how Dynamics fits their workflows. The pitch materials launched over a year ago have seen thousands of downloads from partners and hundreds of uses internally. The conversation explores how product teams historically organized around features - warehouse management PMs, general ledger PMs - rather than end-to-end processes. The business process catalog emerged from FastTrack escalations that kept repeating. Anne explains they were only providing best practice recommendations after dealing with problems multiple times, then realized they could just document everything proactively. Johan and Gustav champion the catalog as crucial guidance, eliminating the "it depends" paralysis that plagued every implementation decision. The first three catalog layers remain product-agnostic, helping navigate scenarios where multiple Microsoft solutions could work - quotations in CRM versus Project Operations versus core SCM. Anne emphasizes this isn't Microsoft alone - crowdsourcing from the partner community makes the catalog a living repository, similar to FastTrack's GitHub telemetry dashboards. A significant announcement: business process decks are now available on the FastTrack implementation portal for any customer with a Dynamics project, enabling internal pitching and discovery workshops.
Transcribe →10.0.46
Oct 3100:18:48Tap to summarizeJohan and Gustav brave the dark, rainy Swedish fall to discuss Dynamics 365 release 10.0.46, but the real headline isn't in the official notes. Johan shares exciting news from the MVP community: the first production Power Platform Admin Center environment has been deployed, marking a monumental milestone in the shift away from LCS. While limited to certain scenarios initially (no commerce yet, no massive implementations), it signals the beginning of the "one Dynamics, one platform" future. Gustav tackles e-invoicing developments, noting Switzerland's new structured QR bill addresses and Poland's KSEF QR capabilities. The regulatory landscape across Europe keeps the Pride team scrambling, with different features arriving through different channels - some as standard features, others in quality updates. Performance takes center stage with subscription billing optimizations that "reduce chattyness" in batch processing - a term Gustav finds amusing to see in official release notes. The hosts champion data entities, with Johan reminiscing about how DMF and OData revolutionized data integration 11 years ago. A new fixed assets transfer entity emerges in preview, while the grid functionality continues evolving with Excel-like capabilities. The pricing management discussion reveals a significant development: calculating prices without creating sales orders. Gustav notes this helps customers avoid CSU licensing costs while maintaining unified pricing experiences, though he remains a CSU advocate. The conversation highlights the modern challenge - multiple valid approaches to solve the same problem, requiring careful architectural decisions.
Transcribe →10.0.45
Sep 1200:26:16Tap to summarizeJohan and Gustav return well-rested from summer break to dive into Dynamics 365 release 10.0.45, admitting it takes about a week to get back to full functionality after vacation. They acknowledge their previous episode on 44 arrived fashionably late but encourage listeners to read the release notes themselves since their technical bias might miss functional gems. Gustav opens with the Customer Invoice Logging Framework - a mouthful of a name for what's essentially a structured logging system that tracks invoice lifecycles. Having tested it in preview, he demonstrates how it provides a centralized workspace showing batch job execution results, error tracking, and direct links to problematic sales orders. This eliminates the old nightmare of calling IT to check BizTalk for invoice status. Johan champions Application Insights integration for batch jobs, explaining how it creates a single monitoring pane across Azure services. He emphasizes the importance of establishing baselines when everything works perfectly, not just monitoring failures. The conversation reveals a crucial insight about batch jobs often appearing successful while actually failing underneath. Electronic Reporting gets significant attention with performance improvements and a game-changing Key Vault integration. Johan's eureka moment: Key Vault can serve as environment variables during database refreshes, automatically reconfiguring integrations without manual intervention. They also tackle the terrifying scenario of Electronic Reporting retry mechanisms accidentally sending thousands of duplicate invoices to customers. The episode wraps with commerce updates including the Bing Maps to Azure Maps transition, enhanced pricing management capabilities, and the new Warehousing app V4.
Transcribe →10.0.44
Aug 1500:23:43Tap to summarizeJohan and Gustav reunite in the same room to explore the latest Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations release 10.0.44, discovering some surprising gems along the way. Gustav kicks off with excitement about long-overdue fixed assets improvements, including automated inventory value adjustments that tie purchase orders directly to asset journals, and a new budget depreciation proposal feature that saves time across multiple legal entities. The conversation shifts to the evolving payments landscape, where Johan highlights the new native Klarna integration for buy-now-pay-later scenarios and expanded Adyen capabilities including QR code payments. They discuss how these standardized integrations eliminate the custom development headaches that have plagued payment provider implementations, forcing providers to adhere to common frameworks rather than reinventing the wheel each time. A standout feature emerges in the form of "immersive home" - an AI-powered task-focused interface that replaces the traditional module-based navigation. Rather than clicking through workspaces, users get intelligent recommendations about what needs their attention right now. Gustav notes this fulfills a promise that's been made since AX 2012 but never quite delivered until AI made it genuinely useful. The episode wraps with practical improvements like automated cleanup of temporary data to reduce storage costs, better offline sync monitoring for POS systems, and enhanced visibility into year-end closing processes. These seemingly small features address real pain points that consultants encounter daily in the field. Gustav and Johan encourage listeners to dive into the full release notes themselves, admitting they're "egotistical" in only covering what interests them most. LINKS: Service update availability What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Commerce 10.0.44 What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 10.0.44 What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Finance 10.0.44 What's new or changed in Platform updates
Transcribe →Interview - Max Hentschel
Jul 2500:31:39Tap to summarizeDynamics Update: Dual Write Deep Dive with Max Sentchell Episode recorded in Portorož, Slovenia Johan and Gustav chat with Max Sentchell, a Microsoft Technical Architect who created the popular DW Helper tool out of frustration with manually configuring dual write mappings. His GitHub tool automates the painful process of setting up 80-90 mappings in the correct sequence across multiple environments. The conversation debunks a major misconception: dual write isn't broken, it just works differently than traditional integrations by syncing database fields directly. Most "dual write errors" actually originate in Finance & Operations or Dataverse, not the connector itself. The real challenge isn't technical though. Dual write projects fail when organizations treat them as mere technical implementations rather than fundamental workflow changes. CRM and ERP teams can no longer work in silos - they need unified processes, shared deployments, and coordinated database refreshes. Max's key insight: dual write exposes hidden master data quality issues, but the technology works reliably when teams collaborate properly from day one. The upcoming move to Power Platform Admin Center will make this unified approach more visible to customers.
Transcribe →